Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 255

Sun Singer Secrets - Raven

I love playing with languages even though I'm language-challenged when it comes to anything other than English. So it's a challenge when my characters speak something else, say, Blackfeet for example.

Raven, a bird with very magical, creative and shapeshifting powers, is a character in "The Sun Singer." Needless to say, he doesn't speak English. Since Raven comes from Montana, he speaks Blackfeet.

My young protagonist Robert Adams doesn't speak Blackfeet, so when he hears David Ward and Raven h...

Does chili say "I love you"

"Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Actually, I bought my wife a bouquet of roses for Valentine's Day and she made me an apple pie. We each bought suitable cards, too, of course. As for the chili, after reading on Facebook about King Crab legs and steak and champagne, I'm feeling a bit out of touch with my Dutch oven full of chili simmering away for dinner tonight.

I know some people re...

Friday's snowfall

Northeast Georgia doesn't see much snow; what little the state gets is usually confined to the mountains. But today's system dumped 2-4 inches in our area, creating traffic havoc sown in Atlanta when everyone apparently left work at the same time.

Lesa took this picture at dusk while we were heating up some leftover stew for dinner:



Today was a good day for finishing most of the edits for the new edition of "The Sun Singer" coming out in in several weeks from Vanilla Heart Publishing.

Assuming t...

Sunny Day Research

The sun's out in Jackson County today, so that means the logical side of my Leo personality is in charge.

You know, I'm now using the same Friesian horse character in a third novel, and in all this time, I've never met anyone who owned a Friesian who also lives near me. Barbara in Germany takes great pictures of her Friesians, but for your typical deadbeat, starving writer, Germany's not on the radar. I always wanted to ride a Friesian--even if I fell off--so that to some extent, I'd be writin...

Rainy Day People

Rainy day people don't talk
They just listen til they've heard it all

--Gordon Lightfoot, "Rainy Day People"

I'm "rainy day people," and that means north Georgia has had plenty of my kind of days, days like today that are good for a writer. This writer, anyhow. My impressions of the world are clearer in the rain. Perhaps rain is a good conductor of psychic energy and the voice of the muse. A writer needs to listen, I think. Quite often, it's to the natural world, all there is to hear after s/he...

Weekend Musings

I know it's about time to write when my characters keep me awake at night. Not today, though: I'm too sleepy. But I'm seeing Sarabande's journey more clearly now, the hope of it, the pain of it, and I want to make it true. "Sarabande" is a sequel to my 2004 mountain adventure novel "The Sun Singer." The second addition of "The Sun Singer" is being released later this month by Vanilla Heart Publishing.

Meanwhile, I invite you to read my interview with Smoky Trudeau, author of "Observations of a...

Jock learns Race Ready not meant for real men

from "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire," a comedy/thriller about horses, horse thieves, girl friends and murderers. In the following excerpt, he's on the trail of whoever stole Mayor Clark Trail's race horse Sea of Fire.

Coral Snake Smith needed two omelets to loosen his tongue. For an informed source who made his living trading information for food, one might think Smith would have picked up some table manners along with the details of everyone else's life. Jock drank half a cup of co...

Glacier National Park Personages

This year marks the centennial celebration for Montana's Glacier National Park. Ah, the anniversary of my favorite place has drawn be back into the park's history, especially some of the people involved over the years. This led to an article about the former mining boom town of Altyn in the Swiftcurrent Valley (now part of the park) in the upcoming Natures's Gifts anthology from Vanilla Heart Publishing as well as a series of posts on my Malcolm's Round Table blog:

Caroline Lockhart (novelist)...

Maybe I Need to Write Better Blurbs

James Patterson's "Worst Case" occupies the front cover of the February "Forecast" catalogue from Baker & Taylor. Linda Fairstein's "Hell Gate" occupies the back cover. Do you think either book will be hard to find in your local bookstore?

Those of us who write on a more modest scale will never appear on the high-cost advertising pages of "Forecast," much less have our books accompanied by the phrase "Major Marketing Campaign."

So what are we to do to get noticed? After looking at a page of Ber...

Tuesday Teaser

I very much enjoyed reading Fairlee Winfield's novel "Buffaloed" about a young immigrant from Norway working as a house maid for the famed cowboy artist Charlie Russell. I posted a "Tuesday Teaser" about the book on my Writer's Notebook blog and a review of the book on Malcolm's Round Table.

Now, I've left the Great Falls, Montana world of the early 1900s and have stepped back in time to North Carolina in the days of the Revolutionary War. Perhaps you guessed that I've finally started Diana Ga...